Following the Supreme Court decision that reaffirmed the quaint notion that racism is bad and colleges and universities may no longer discriminate against white and Asian students, our elite educational institutions have been in a tizzy over how to ensure their racism can continue unabated.
Here comes The New York Times to the rescue.
After the Supreme Court effectively ended affirmative action in 2023, many selective colleges said they still prized racial diversity and planned to pursue it. But how might they do that?
I would have hoped to have been shown the courtesy of subtlety, just a fig leaf maybe, or a little wink and a nod so they could pretend to respect the rule of law and our Constitutional safeguards.
But, nope, they just come right and say it, sitting back and admiring the ability of their models to produce the desired result.
It also produces significant shifts among high-income white students; their share of the admitted class is 27 percentage points lower than it would be in a test-only environment.
Fewer students who are white and come from high-income backgrounds? Why, That's both racist and classist!
The piece begins with remorse over the loss of explicit racism.
Selective colleges and universities can no longer use race-based preferences in admissions to create a more diverse student body.
This is said with sorrow, and the rock-solid conviction that diversity is the most important goal when it comes to higher education, outranking merit, our competitiveness in a world economy, and people's very health and well being who will be relying on these future professionals.
But what if they gave a break instead to lower-income students? Or those from high-poverty schools? Or those who do relatively well academically despite challenges all around them?
Sounds benign. Let's give the underdogs a chance. But that's not their end goal.
To explore those questions — and how much racial diversity is possible without "race-conscious" admissions —
That is, how much can we explicitly violate the Constitution without explicitly violating the Constitution?
They even put "race-conscious" in scare quotes.
...the Upshot [the section in which this appeared in The New York Times] worked with Sean Reardon, a professor at Stanford, and Demetra Kalogrides, a senior researcher there, to model four alternatives to affirmative action.
These are not alternatives meant to bring in the best and brightest from overlooked backgrounds, or even, heaven forbid, an exploration of the disgrace that is public education in our inner cities, but rather an attempt to jury-rig an end run around the Supreme Court.
So much easier than solving actual problems!
Using SAT scores as a proxy, and "Tier 1" schools as a subset, they run through four models, the end goal of each is to deny otherwise qualified white and Asian students the chance to be their very best thus optimizing the welfare of society at large.
This produces a series of entertaining graphs like the ones below. You can then manipulate the criteria selection to your heart's content, like playing God.
First up, focusing on poor people, which tells you a lot about how leftists view minorities.
Scenario 1 of 4: A preference for poorer students
In this scenario, we give a moderate boost to applicants on a sliding scale according to their parents' income: from an extra 150 points for students from the poorest families, to 0 points for students from the richest ones.
This is a Marxist fantasy. Move a cutoff line here, change the slope there, and voila!
Fewer rich people.
Because each of our scenarios admits a fixed class of 500 students, the results are zero-sum: As some students are newly admitted, others who might have been admitted under different policies no longer are.
Those "different policies" under which others might have been admitted? Those were merit based. I don't believe SATs are the be-all and end-all of measuring talent and capability, but that's the test they chose to use for their modeling, and they barely even bother to address the ramifications to society of overturning a system based on merit and replacing it with one based on their intersectional fantasies and the ill-defined benefits of "diversity."
In this case, as more low-income students are admitted, some high-income students with SAT scores just above 1300 no longer get in.
Sorry bright students with high SAT scores.
Your rich parents just blew it for you.
Serves them right, being rich and all.
That trade-off creates significantly more economic diversity, as this table shows:
Hey, it's a trade-off, and an unalloyed good one because DIVERSITY!
Nine percent fewer rich whites?
There's one problem with this, one the lefties never considered, one that is unfathomable to them:
White people can be poor too!
😱
But the shifts toward racial diversity are modest. The Black student share rises by just one percentage point. Why? Black families are over-represented among poorer households in America, but in terms of total numbers, there are still many more poorer white households.
On to the next scenario.
Scenario 2 of 4: Adding school poverty
In addition to a preference for low-income students, what if we added a preference for those who attend higher poverty schools?
Yeah, they really don't think much of minorities.
The problem with this scenario? Still too many whites.
On to plan C!
Scenario 3 of 4: Finding the outliers
It's possible to take the underlying idea in Scenario 2 and dial it up further, by identifying students who outperform their peers with similar disadvantages (or similar advantages).
This was the best one yet!
Of the scenarios tested so far, this one does the most to produce both economic and racial diversity, compared with admitting students on test scores alone. It also produces significant shifts among high-income white students; their share of the admitted class is 27 percentage points lower than it would be in a test-only environment.
One step closer to a socialist Utopia.
One tiny little downside, hardly worth mentioning.
Unless one of these graduates is your surgeon.
The resulting average SAT score of the admitted class is also the lowest of the scenarios so far, at 1340.
That leaves Plan D.
Scenario 4 of 4: Casting a wider net
What happens when colleges try to expand the applicant pool?
To create this scenario, we expanded the pool of applicants to selective colleges by modeling a recruiting strategy targeted at predominantly minority high schools.
Expand the pool? Sure, I'm okay with that. Expand it only towards predominantly minority high schools? A little racist-y.
First, we pull into the applicant pool all students of any race with SAT scores above 1000 at high schools where at least three-quarters of students are nonwhite. Then we rerun the preference for beating the odds from Scenario 3 with this larger applicant pool.
This gets us the closest to achieving our socialist/racist agenda.
This strategy most notably captures more Hispanic students, and it produces by far the biggest shift toward lower-income students. It broadly redistributes seats held in an SAT-only scenario by high-income white students and, to a lesser degree, high-income Asian ones.
"Redistributes" sounds much better than "take away," which is why socialists use the same term to describe what they want to do with your wealth.
Some of these efforts, such as broadening outreach, are appealing. There is hidden talent out there to be sure, but the big fixes, the hard ones, the ones that will require courage and the willingness to stand up to powerful interests will require addressing the destruction of the family (and the policies that encourage it) and the disgrace that is our public education system.
Trying to fix it at the top, at Yale, Princeton, and Harvard, is backwards, like first addressing a flooded basement by getting new bedroom furniture.
There is also a certain meanness to these efforts to reduce white people's, and maybe even more so, wealthy white people's participation in our national institutions.
To wit, following a discussion of Scenario 2 above, we are treated to this.
Do something like that, and "now you have a group of students who have overcome a lot more in life than the ones who have just been handed everything," said Richard Kahlenberg, a researcher at the Progressive Policy Institute who has argued for this kind of robust class preference. He also served as an expert witness critiquing race-based admissions in the litigation that led to the Supreme Court decision.
Really? You know that Richard, you know that all these kids about whom you know nothing "have just been handed everything?"
Heck, not even minorities are spared the class treatment with these people.
Notably, our simple affirmative action model produces far less economic diversity than all of these alternatives. That was also a frequent criticism of such policies: Yes, colleges used them to admit more Black and Hispanic students, but those were overwhelmingly middle- and upper-income students.
Lefties like minorities, as long as they know their place, which is poor and dependent on them.
If our leaders are serious about addressing income and educational disparity, they should start at the source, at the beginning.
They should start with themselves.
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